He was thirty-four and she was fifty-four. At the start of the trip, Jimmy and Wallis were just friends by the time they disembarked they were lovers. He was a brilliant gossip, prankster and jokester. His mother had often pulled him out of school to accompany her on her travels.
He was an old hand at entertaining older women. It was there, on the high seas, that Wallis fell in love with Jimmy. It was a trip they had taken many times before but this time Jimmy Donahue was on board. The Windsors were equally impressed by the Donahue's money, houses, servants and lifestyle.Įverything changed in 1950, when the Duke and Duchess decided to take the RMS Queen Mary from New York to Cherbourg. As a kid Jimmy had dreamed of being the best friend of the Duke of Windsor when he was still the Prince of Wales, and now here he was sitting having tea in his mother's living room. Jessie Donahue was thrilled when the Windsors attended lunches and dinners at her palatial Cielito Lindo in Palm Beach or at her triplex in New York. Here the Windsor's were treated like royalty. Her marriage to James Donahue, whose family had made their money from fat rendering, hadn't burnished her pedigree.įor their part, the Windsors found America more congenial than Europe where the Duke's indiscret behavior, like his meeting with Hitler in Germany, embarrassed the royal family.
Woolworth, she was still considered new money to the old guard of Palm Beach Society. Although she had inherited millions from her father F.W. Jimmy's mother Jessie Woolworth Donahue hoped that rubbing shoulders with the royal couple would boost her own social standing. The Duke of Windsor's former Lord-in-Waiting, the Earl of Sefton, suggested her as a hostess to the royal visitors. Jimmy Donahue and the Duchess of Windsor had been introduced in the early 1940's when the Duke and Duchess had traveled to Palm Beach from the Bahamas where the Duke was serving as Governor General.
Wallis was so enthralled with her young swain and the lifestyle that he offered her that she actually contemplated leaving the Duke for him. They were an odd couple in many ways but despite their differences, the Duchess of Windsor and Jimmy Donahue kept gossips and high society on both sides of the Atlantic agog as they danced and flirted their way from New York to Palm Beach to Europe. She was one of the most famous women in the world, one half of 'the love story of the century.' He was a rich, handsome, high school drop-out and mama's boy twenty years younger, and gay. "You have no idea how hard it is to live out a great romance." the Duchess of Windsor to a friend.It was a relationship that baffled and mystified their friends, and entertained their enemies.
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